In Paris on April 4, 2017, Kobili Traoré broke into the apartment of a neighbor, a retired Jewish physician named Sarah Halimi, and proceeded to beat her viciously while shouting anti-Semitic slurs. He then threw her out the window, and to her death, with a shout of “Allahu Akbar!” On Wednesday, a French high court upheld a previous decision that Traoré could not be held accountable for Halimi’s murder because he was under the influence of marijuana. Bari Weiss comments:
The rule of thumb, as the British writer and comedian David Baddiel has noted in his new book [of that name], is that Jews don’t count. But there is a more sophisticated version of this bloody arithmetic. When a Jew is harassed by a neo-Nazi, he counts. When a Jew is harassed by a person from another minority group, not so much. When a secular Jew is attacked, he counts. But when a Jew with a black hat is attacked, that’s ignored. If the story suits the narrative, it counts. If it undermines it, it doesn’t.
And so it is the case with the four-year saga of Sarah Halimi. . . . As Francis Szpiner, one of the Halimi family’s lawyers, asked of the court’s strange logic: “Will this also apply to drunk drivers who kill children on the road?” The question answers itself. The madness here does not belong to Traoré. It belongs to France.
[A] survey conducted by the American Jewish Committee last year found that 70 percent of French Jews say they have been victims of at least one anti-Semitic incident in their lifetime. . . . The French Jewish community, which is the largest Jewish community in all of Europe, has seen which way the wind is blowing for a while now. French Jews are heading for the exits, mostly to Israel.
Previous reports on the predicament of French Jewry can be read here, here, and here.
Read more on Common Sense: https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/why-france-refuses-to-prosecute-an